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The Ultimate VoIP Solution: Page 4 of 6

Yet for all its similarities to the big VoIP systems on the market today, the Incredible VoIP Solution breaks new ground in many areas. Its fully distributed and open architecture is, if not unique, at least rarely offered in highly scaleable corporate IP telephony products. The extensive use of presence technology foreshadows the type of IP phones that will be possible in years ahead. Even minor details, such as improving reboot times by downloading configuration updates rather than the full configuration files, are something that many VoIP systems still lack today.


Executive Editor David Greenfield can be reached at [email protected].

The Incredible VoIP Management System

The Incredible VoIP Management System should integrate with the general network management system, as well as provide the necessary tools to configure, manage, and troubleshoot a VoIP network. More specifically, the VoIP management system should use identities contained within the corporate LDAP database and the company's identity management solution (for example, Microsoft's Identity Integration Server). This simplifies the configuration of roles, access rights, and policies in the VoIP solution.

Telephony vendors tend to emphasize the benefits of treating the VoIP system as a single entity, but our panel favored a different approach. VoIP policies, such as those regarding dialing-plan information, should be expressed network-wide. However, configuration information is server-specific and requires the ability to alter port settings and configuration parameters individually for each server. Thus, as part of that configuration process, network managers should be able to place restrictions on what users can do. This includes limiting the use of voice, video, and data sharing or IM during a call; the number of users participating in a given call; and the number of simultaneous calls that a user can establish. The system should be able to determine the right codec to use on each call based on the available bandwidth and the type of user.